The WBR seems to get a bit of a bad rap with some people for it’s sensitivity. A comment on the last post from a reader called Simon, reminded me that some WBR builders have experienced poor sensitivity. Based on my experience, this design does seem to be fairly deaf on AM, but the sensitivity […]
A query I hear from time to time about using copper-plated boards for Manhattan construction is what they look like after a few months or years. “How do they age?” is the question. My first such project, the WBR, was housed in an enclosure made from double-sided PCB material, and I could see that the […]
A few weeks ago, I received an e-mail from Mike N2HTT. He was building a WBR Regen, and had encountered a problem – the pesky thing didn’t work. That is indeed, quite a problem. Luckily for me, he quickly discovered that the reason was an incorrectly wired JFET, before I had a chance to confuse […]
Note – some of the narrative in this blog-post assumes that you have access to, and have read, N1BYT’s original article on the WBR Receiver in the August 2001 edition of QST. EDIT – as of July 2016, I just modded this receiver to cover the 30M ham band only, and have been surprised by […]
About a week and a half ago, I received an e-mail from Rich W9RNK. After a long period of home-brew inactivity (about 20 years) he decided to pick up the soldering iron and start building again. He said that my post on building N1BYT’s WBR Regen Receiver (the most popular post on this blog by far) […]
It’s been almost 10 months since I published the post on my build of N1BYT’s WBR Receiver – a regen with an unusual design that minimizes re-radiation of the local oscillator signal without the need for an RF pre-amp. It’s fairly sensitive, stable, and only draws about 12-13mA. I’m sitting here right now with this great little regen listening to Bill […]
I finally got around to putting up a video of the WBR Regen on YouTube. Unfortunately, I didn’t get many good recordings of SSB – this was mainly due to band conditions and the times of day that I was recording. However, it was time for me to get this thing out so that I […]
The previous post felt like a triumphant one. I built N1BYT’s WBR Regen, housed it in an enclosure I also made myself and it worked very well. It was one of those home-brew projects that turn out exactly the way you’d hoped it would. The number of positive comments received was quite overwhelming and to […]
EDIT (July 26th 2014) – If you’re thinking of building the WBR, I strongly suggest you check out my most recent build here, which incorporates a mod suggested by LA3PNA, and a different configuration for the AF amp that I think provides nicer sounding audio. The full schematic is published there also. A few weeks ago when […]
Dave Richards AA7EE 